However misfortunate 2020 appears to be, it is also a year that will soon give us a much more profound equivalent of Amazon Web Services for the Internet of Things. The Robonomics Web Services parachain is set to provide both existing and upcoming IoT devices with functions and security that are unobtainable via cloud services offered by IT giants.
Compared to the Amazon AWS tools, RWS stands for a high level of security that can only be provided by adopting a decentralised ecosystem. Furthermore, it stipulates not only technical but also the economic types of transactions and gives IoT devices access to smart contracts and cryptocurrency that can be utilised for IoT operations. It is this and much more that RWS achieves by running on decentralised networks like Polkadot and Ethereum, instead of mundane cloud services the market is filled with.
Thanks to its decentralised structure, RWS becomes practically unbreakable compared to cloud platforms that at the time of failure, take down incremental apps we use on a daily basis. On 26th of November, such failure happened within Amazon Web Services, when an outage took down specifically the IoT environments, affecting companies like Adobe, 1Password, Acorns, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, Pocket, Roku, The Washington Post and more.
According to the team behind RWS, the subscription to their parachain service won’t be greater than $10 per month and enable its clients to make hundreds of thousands of transactions on the Polkadot ecosystem. This means that businesses will have an opportunity to connect their robotic services (i.e. robots and drones) to the global IoT network at a fraction of the market price, and allow end-users to interact with the IoT world from their smartphones and other similar devices.
Heterogeneous tokenomics serves as one of the highlight characteristics of the RWS parachain. In other words, developers will now be able to opt for an alternative method of payment for transactions where the RWS token secures you a monthly subscription, helping to part with the standard tx fee model and the already existing XRT token.
The latter does not limit the token holder in time of token usage and the number of transactions in one block. The former, on the other hand, limits a token holder to one transaction per block but provides stable operation of your IoT devices. Developers behind RWS believe that a mix of these two payment models will eliminate the race for resources, when Ethereum blockchain for example gets overloaded and opposingly will provide the network with a stable load of transactions.
Robonomics Web Services serve as one of the evolution pillars of the Robonomics Network, a platform/environment where robotic services can be and are implemented according to the standards and principles of Industry 4.0. Therefore, the value of the platform lies in its ability to provide IoT devices with access to the Polkadot, Ethereum, IPFS and Filecoin environments, allowing for scalability that cannot be matched by any other network.
Today, Robonomics is part of three key IoT projects based on Substrate on Polkadot. Moreover, the team has recently announced that they are aiming to rent a slot in a Kusama network with further planned migration to Polkadot Relay Chain in order to deploy one million IoT digital twins. Still, if you don’t want to wait, there is a Robonomics Beta that can already be accessed on the Kusama network.
You can read more about Robonomics Web Services in my long read.
